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Francis Collins Cavils
On CNN, during an interview with Jim Acosta, the NIH director stated regarding the clash between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci “Well, it’s very unfortunate to have something that I think could be readily resolved in terms of understanding the meaning of the term ‘gain of function.’ But instead this has turned into political theatrics. It’s really unfortunate. We have so many more important things to spend our time on right now. But it’s a diagnosis of just how polarized everything has become. So, that even in the face of this terrible pandemic that has taken more than 600.000 lives in this country, this kind of time is being wasted on this kind of posturing.”
Collins of course never tries to clarify the term “gain of function.” His answer impresses me as a variation on a theme of Bill Clinton’s, every time he was asked about Monica Lewinski. He would refuse to answer and say he had to get back to work for the American people. Same sort of caviling.
Collins goes on to avoid answering directly Acosta’s question on Fauci’s insistence that the NIH never funded gain of function research at Wuhan, He simply states that Anthony Fauci has been truthful in all his interactions with Collins and is a great public servant, but never specifically denies that gain of function research was funded by NIH at Wuhan. Cavil after cavil, avoidance after avoidance. Non sequitur after non sequitur.
Collins: “I absolutely support Tony Fauci in every way. I have never known him to be anything other than completely truthful. He is a public servant that people should all be thankful to. And to see him attacked and demonized this way on political grounds is really hard to watch.” Methinks the director, like Anthony Fauci confronting Rand Paul, doth protest too much.
He has as much responsibility as does Fauci if gain of function research funded by the NIH at Wuhan did indeed produce this pandemic. Which is looking increasingly likely. He was in the loop with Fauci on the successful effort to avoid the moratorium on such research funding. SO he has a very strong vested interest in denying that the NIH funded gain of function research at Wuhan. Yet he never clearly states that the NIH did not fund such research. He punts, and gives Fauci the benefit of the doubt, then pleads victimhood for him. Disgraceful.
Then he enthusiastically agrees with the judicial decision regarding the Indiana University vaccine mandate, though he had just acknowledged that such mandates were problematic with a vaccine not fully cleared for use as nonexperimental. He states that full approval of the vaccines is a month or two away. Obviously, he is putting pressure on the FDA for full clearance of the vaccine, removing the vaccines from experimental status. The FDA may be foolish enough to succumb to such pressure.
That judicial decision, as I have noted previously, utterly violates the bedrock medical ethics (that phrase has become an oxymoron, unfortunately) principle that no medical experimentation be done without informed consent of the subject of the experimentation, without coercion of any sort. That principle was ostensibly established at Nuremberg. We now have the NIH director on record as supporting such coerced medical experimentation.
I invoke Richard Feynman, who used to wander around Los Alamos cracking safes and leaving notes for Security stating: “This safe is not safe.” Francis Collins’ medical ethics are not ethical. But you can say that about pretty much all medical ethics today, sadly. And in my opinion, as a physician, that has been the case for a very long time. To paraphrase AlanPaton: Cry, the beloved profession.
Published in General
Must resist . . . being . . . that . . . guy . . .
I am so sick of the evasive interviews and the doublespeak coming from these people. Why should we believe any of them?
Thank you.
I am forgetting which current vaccine researcher started out being skeptical of criticism of the vax industry.
Then someone gave him a clinical study showing that vaccines were safe. The person giving it to him stated, “Don’t just read the study, which is glossing the problem over. Read the bibliography as well.”
bear in mind the study was pro-vaccine, so it stands to reason that whichever scientists worked on it would have also put together a bibliography pf clinical reports supporting in total the state of vaccines in the USA. Instead every one of the two dozen studies and trials recorded in the bibliography tore a hole in the idea that vaccines are made safely.
Now the study had been peer reviewed – yet no one in the industry even bothered to look at the various items in the bibliography.
In the following quotes, Angell, Horton and Ley Jr indicate their skepticism about what passes for science these days.
counting down until the definition of “Gain of Function” changes on Wikipedia…..3….2….1
This is total BS. He’s a public master, not a public servant. We don’t have public servants anymore. That’s a euphemism they use to cloak their authoritarianism.
I recall all too vividly, in 2007, when the NEJM released a study by Steven Nissan, then a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, regarding the cardiac toxicity of Avandia (a diabetes med in the same class as Actos). The study purported to be a “meta-analysis” of data on Avandia and cardiac events. Dr. Nissan claimed to have found that Avandia posed a statistically significant risk of cardiac damage. The problem was that the article violated all the rules for a meta-analysis, and the statistical method used (called the Peto method after a British Cardiologist) was invalid for the data analyzed (numerical discrepancies between the size of treatment groups vs control groups was too great for the Peto method to be valid). The NEJM knew all of this, but published anyway. The first person in the country to get a copy of the article before it was available to anyone else, was Henry Waxman, the Democratic congressman running committee hearings on re-authorization of legislation on the FDA. He immediately held a press conference, waving the article, claiming that this was the smoking gun evidence that the FDA needed post marketing authority to demand removal of drugs (which it did not have then, and does not have now–it can ask that drugs be removed, but not require this). The paper was published for purely political reasons. The paper was so egregiously in error that the top peer reviewer of the article (peer reviewers generally remain anonymous), Dr. Stephen Hafner, the veritable dean of cardiovascular and lipid epidemiology in diabetes at UT San Antonio, held a press conference to state that he had advised the NEJM against publication of the article and in that press conference stated:
“The New England Journal of Medicine, in publishing this article, has become like a British tabloid, minus the picture of the bare-chested woman on page 3”
A long standing problem.
Fauci is the most disingenuous politician, ahem, public servant this side of Pelosi.
He’s effectively saying that he didn’t kill anybody, he just paid the hitman to conduct a ballistics test on some guy’s head.
Just think how different this whole coronavirus episode would have been if Fauci just admitted that he approved funding for this research at the outset. All that business about the wet markets was nonsense and he knew it last March. He wasn’t allowed to fund this kind of research because, as I understand it, the Obama administration forbade it. And you know he knew because he hired a cutout in Ecomed(?).
That SOB should’ve stood up to say it came from the lab, its not a wild Trump theory. He knew better, but was silent while pangolins’ reputations were taking the hit. Ditto the impending breakthrough vaccine that he’s taking bows for. Pfizer famously announced its vaccine approval two days after the election. Surely he knew that FDA approval was a done deal before the election, but he kept mum. That might’ve made a difference in the election last year.
You don’t pay for research. You pay for the results of the research, the information. Fauci isn’t paying for this gain of function research without seeing what the results are. It would not surprise me if he knew it couldn’t be transmitted by touch. Yet we all spent months swabbing packages with Clorox wipes. He was probably walking around with information in his head that he didn’t disclose because talking about it would have pointed out that he was funding research that he was barred from funding.
I honestly think the only reason he hung onto his job this long is to cover his posterior.
Thumbed for this.
Won’t someone please think of the pangolins?
Pangolins fall into that class of entity which, if they aren’t guilty, ought to be.